A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  As black leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans promoted the deployment of black troops, Lincoln moved, quietly, behind the scenes. All the while he was being encouraged, if not pushed, by Secretary of War Stanton, with whom he had forged a strong working relationship.

  When Stanton replaced Simon Cameron in Lincoln’s cabinet in January 1862, he quickly learned that Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase stood alone in the cabinet in arguing that it made no sense to fight a war while refusing to deal with the underlying cause of the rebellion. Stanton had made himself acceptable to the Buchanan-Breckinridge cabinet by muting his own views, and he did the same thing in his first months in the Lincoln cabinet.

  In his early work with Lincoln, Stanton recognized in the president a cautious if not apprehensive attitude about the arming of black troops. In Stanton’s dealings with Congress, however, he found himself gravitating toward the ideas of the Benjamin Wade–Zachariah Chandler– Thaddeus Stevens troika, who were far ahead of Lincoln in seeing the absolute necessity of using black troops to win the war.

  After January 1, 1863, Lincoln followed Stanton’s lead in the arming of black troops. But moving African-Americans from their role as contraband laborers in the rear to trained soldiers at the front would require navigating a tricky obstacle course. The initial obstacle was the white mind-set that blacks, after years of plantation life, did not have the courage to step forward and fight, but would melt away at the first sign of struggle. A second obstacle was the deep prejudice of most white officers from the North who were unwilling to see black soldiers fight alongside white ones. The Confederates were the third obstacle as, alert to the problem of runaway slaves, they moved their slaves away from the seacoast, far from Union lines.

  On March 25, 1863, Stanton ordered General Lorenzo Thomas, a career officer, to go to the Mississippi Valley to head up recruitment of African-Americans. Thomas, who for most of his career had been a desk general, surprised his colleagues by becoming a military entrepreneur who, with tireless energy, regularized the recruitment of black soldiers. On the day he began his assignment, only five black regiments had been organized. By the end of 1863, twenty regiments would be organized. The day Thomas headed west, Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the Democratic military governor of Tennessee, “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest?”

  Artist James Fuller Queen painted these twelve illustrated cards in 1863 depicting the journey of a slave from plantation life to freedom. The culmination of the journey is service in the Union army, where he willingly gives his life for the cause of the Union and liberty.

  In these months, Lincoln moved from hesitant consent to eager advocacy of black soldiers. He wrote to Stanton, “I desire that a renewed and vigorous effort be made to raise colored forces along the shores of the Mississippi.” Stanton had kept Lincoln informed of Thomas’s success. The president was impressed. “I think the evidence is nearly conclusive that Gen. Thomas is one of the best, if not the very best, instruments for this service.”

  LINCOLN WATCHED IMPATIENTLY as Joseph Hooker took charge of the Army of the Potomac. Skeptics abounded. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., great-grandson and grandson of presidents, wrote his father, the U.S. minister to England, that the “Army of the Potomac is at present fearfully demoralized.” He added, “The Government” took away McClellan and relieved Burnside—“all this that Hooker may be placed in command, a man who has not the confidence of the army and who in private character is well known to be—I need not say what.”

  Much of the resentment in the initial days of Hooker’s command was due to the disheartening condition of the soldiers. Thousands were in poor health, and hundreds were dying from lack of adequate medical care in their winter quarters. The majority opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Desertions numbered two hundred per day.

  Ill will turned to goodwill, however, as Hooker initiated changes. New hospitals were built and older ones revamped. Improved rations, especially vegetables, suddenly appeared. Hooker stated, “My men shall be fed before I am fed, and before any of my officers are fed.” In March, he instituted insignia badges of different colors, two inches square, which were worn with pride on the caps of the men of each corps. He implemented Lincoln’s order of November 15, 1862, wherein the president, as commander in chief, directed “the orderly observance of the Sabbath,” as “a becoming deference to the best sentiment of a Christian people, and a due regard for the Divine will.”

  Hooker was still not without his detractors. Women and whiskey have always followed soldiers, but Hooker’s headquarters became a gathering place for female camp followers who acquired a name that stuck long after the Civil War—“hookers.” Stanton warned Hooker to prohibit women and liquor from his camps. Young Adams described Hooker’s headquarters as “a combination of bar-room and brothel.”

  Although Hooker was proving to be a good administrator, Lincoln wondered if he was up to the challenge of leading a large army into battle. In February and March, Hooker sent out detachments up and down the Rappahannock, but Robert E. Lee and his troops, in their winter camps south of the river, derided these moves as intended merely to frighten. Southern pickets greeted Union soldiers with derisive cheers. The winter weather was dark, with plenty of snow and sleet, but Hal-leck and Stanton wondered whether Hooker, despite his earlier criticisms of McClellan, was afflicted with the same disease of inaction. Lincoln decided to see for himself.

  On April 4, 1863, Lincoln left the Navy Yard on the steamer Carrie Martin at 5 p.m. leading a party that included Mary, Tad, Attorney General Bates, and Noah Brooks, correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, bound for Hooker’s camp at Falmouth, in northern Virginia. On April 6, a blustery day, Lincoln reviewed the cavalry. The president, an excellent horseman, rode using a saddle recently received by Hooker from San Francisco, while little Tad clung to the saddle of his pony, as drums rolled, trumpets blared, and the various regiments dipped their colors. As the president and General Hooker prepared to receive the troops in review, they witnessed a sight never seen before. In the first two years of the war, the Union cavalry were attached to infantry units and generally misused as escort or messenger services. Now, under the leadership of Major General George Stoneman, who had roomed with Stonewall Jackson at West Point, the cavalry had been brought together under a single command. On this day, seventeen thousand cavalry, with horses prancing, the largest cavalry parade ever assembled, with the six-foot-four-inch Stoneman in the lead, marched before the president.

  The next day, Lincoln insisted on going through all the hospital tents and talking with countless soldiers. He listened with endless patience to the stories of soldiers and offered kindness and comfort in return. When he left the hospital tents he was greeted by a thunderous cheer.

  On April 8, 1863, Lincoln reviewed sixty thousand men in the infantry and artillery. He touched his stovepipe hat in a return salute to the officers, but uncovered his head to the soldiers in the ranks. The review went on, uninterrupted, for five and a half hours.

  But Lincoln mainly came to talk with Hooker. From the outset their conversation took the form of an odd call-and-response. Hooker would begin his conversations with, “When I get to Richmond,” to which Lincoln would respond, “If you get to Richmond, General,” Hooker would then interrupt, “Excuse me, Mr. President, but there is no if in the case. I am going straight to Richmond if I live.”

  Lincoln, in a final conference, haunted by the misuse of resources by George McClellan at Antietam and Ambrose Burnside at Fredericks-burg, spoke with both Hooker and Darius N. Couch, the senior corps commander. “Gentlemen, in your next battle, put in all your men.”

  Lincoln returned to Washington impressed with the changes instituted by Hooker, which had resulted in an obvious upturn of morale, but disturbed by the easy, almost nonchalant attitude he witnessed when he s
ought to engage Hooker in conversation about the difficult days ahead. Lincoln confided to Brooks, “That is the most depressing thing about Hooker. It seems to me that he is over-confident.”

  THREE AND A HALF MONTHS after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln continued to consider its implications, not just for the United States, but for the family of nations. In another of his reflections, this time on the back of Executive Mansion stationery, Lincoln wrote out a resolution on slavery. First, Lincoln stated the problem: “Whereas, while heretofore, States, and Nations, have tolerated slavery, Recently, for the first time in the world, an attempt has been made to construct a new Nation, upon the basis of, and with the primary, and fundamental object to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery, therefore, …”

  Then he stated the resolution: “Resolved, That no such embryo State should ever be recognized by, or Admitted into, the family of christian and civilized nations; and that all ch[r]istian and civilized men everywhere should, by all lawful means, resist to the utmost, such recognition or admission.”

  On April 17, 1863, Lincoln showed this resolution to Senator Charles Sumner. They talked about its use, including publishing it in the English press, to further bolster the cause of the Union there. The resolution was never published, perhaps made unnecessary by events on the battlefield in the next three months. On November 30, Sumner would write to Lincoln encouraging the president to include the resolution in his upcoming annual message to Congress. Lincoln did not do so. Although never to see the public light of day, this private memo is further evidence that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not simply a military emergency strategy, but in his mind the conception of the model of a new nation.

  ULYSSES S. GRANT was one of the few senior generals Lincoln had never met. The president liked what he first heard of the Illinoisan’s unassuming manner. What a contrast after dealing earlier with McClellan and now with Hooker. Lincoln appreciated Grant’s spare but concise communications, his lack of concern about rank, and, most of all, that he never asked for reinforcements and was ready every day to fight.

  The president had heard all the gossip about Grant—that the general was surprised at Shiloh; that Grant had reverted to old habits and was tippling again. He discovered that whenever a politician or another general wished to undercut Grant in the field, they resorted to recycling old stories about Grant and liquor. The president quickly learned of the jealousies within the army. He could believe the resentments against Grant were increasing in direct proportion to his rapid rise in rank.

  In April 1863, Lincoln, in a private reflection, continued to think about the wider implications of emancipation for the family of nations.

  Only once had Lincoln questioned Grant’s judgment. In the fall of 1862, frustrated by the illicit cotton trading along the Mississippi that he believed was channeling supplies and money into the Confederacy, Grant took steps to try to stop it. In November, he gave orders to conductors that some of the traders, Jews, could no longer travel south on the railroad into his military department. On December 17, 1862, when Grant believed his order was being evaded, he issued General Order Number Eleven: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.” Some at the time tried to say that Grant’s order was issued by his staff, or that the word “Jew” was shorthand for shrewd merchants, but Grant alone was responsible for this sweeping anti-Jewish order.

  When it became public, the order produced widespread denunciations of Grant. Cesar J. Kaskel, of Paducah, Kentucky, led a delegation of Jewish leaders who called on Lincoln at the White House. The president, who seven years earlier had expressed his strong disagreement with a nativism that targeted immigrants, especially Catholics, listened respectfully. Kaskel reported that Lincoln defused the tension in the room with a “heartwarming, semi-humorous, Biblical” exchange.

  “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?”

  Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”

  Lincoln responded, “And this protection they shall have at once.” Lincoln told Grant that he was revoking the order immediately.

  IN 1863, Lincoln understood that control of the Mississippi River, which he had navigated twice to New Orleans as a youth and young man, could cut the Confederacy in two. Control depended on the strategic Mississippi fortress town of Vicksburg.

  With Lincoln unable to bring Grant to Washington or visit him in the field, and with rumors circulating in the steamy political air of Washington, Stanton, with Lincoln’s approval, decided to send a personal emissary to be their eyes and ears in Grant’s headquarters. Stanton tapped Charles A. Dana, who since 1847 had been the managing editor of the New York Tribune, to become his assistant secretary of war. He assigned Dana to travel to Grant’s headquarters supposedly to investigate the paymaster service in the Western armies, but really to spy for Stanton.

  Lincoln, although he had never met Ulysses S. Grant, took a long-distance liking to this modest, hard-fighting general. Their growing appreciation of each other would become one of the fascinating stories of the Civil War.

  Dana took the measure of Grant and passed on his findings in almost daily secret ciphers to Stanton and Lincoln. Writing later, he described Grant to be “an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man.” Dana found him “not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered.” Lincoln was strongly inclined to believe in Grant before Dana’s visit, but the newspaperman’s reports only confirmed his own intuition.

  Even so, Lincoln continued to receive charges against the major general. On April 1, 1863, Murat Halstead, editor of the influential Cincinnati Commercial, contacted John Nicolay in an effort “to reach the ear of the President through you.” Halstead wrote, “Grant’s Mississippi opening enterprise is a failure—a total, complete failure.” Three days later, Chase wrote to Lincoln, passing on a letter he had received from Halstead. “Genl. Grant, entrusted with our greatest army, is a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile.” Halstead asked, “Now are our Western heroes to be sacrificed by the ten thousand by this poor devil? Grant will fail miserably, hopelessly, eternally.” Chase added, in an accompanying note, that although he didn’t like the tone of Halstead’s letter, these comments “are too common to be safely or even prudently disregarded.”

  Lincoln had been down this road before—with Pope, McClellan, and Burnside. Criticisms would rise up from the public. Complaints would be registered from within the ranks of officers. Would the criticisms of Grant lead to the same unhappy ending? In May, Lincoln admitted, “I have had stronger influence brought against Grant, praying for his removal … than for any other object, coming too from good men.”

  Grant would need all of his military wisdom and courage for a siege against Vicksburg. Sitting atop two-hundred-foot bluffs, the Confederate garrison was commanded by John Pemberton, a forty-eight-year-old native of Philadelphia who, married to a Virginian, was one of the few Northern officers to join the Confederacy. Grant and Pemberton fought alongside each other in Mexico. Now Pemberton’s soldiers were positioned on the top and the sides of this Mississippi River fortress, ready to rain down fire upon approaching enemy troops.

  Throughout the winter and spring of 1863, Grant pursued option after option. He had his engineers attempt to rechannel the Mississippi River by digging a canal opposite Vicksburg to divert the river, so that he could make an assault from land. Lincoln, with his long-standing fascination with engineering ventures, followed the progress of this proj ect closely. Halleck wrote Grant, “The President attaches much importance to this.” After months of hard labor, however, Grant’s engineers had to abandon the canal as nature took its course.

  In another venture, Admiral David D. Porter sent his ironclad gunbo
ats through Steele’s Bayou, twenty-five miles north of Vicksburg, but the boats were almost trapped by Confederates who felled trees to try to block the boats from each end. Reports began to circulate of flagging morale and of spreading sickness among Grant’s troops—dysentery, typhoid, and pneumonia. The failed attempts, and the rumors about troop morale, increased the criticism of Grant and the pressure on Lincoln.

  Lincoln had his own ideas as to what Grant should do to achieve victory at Vicksburg. Early on, he believed Grant should join forces with General Nathaniel Banks, who became commander of the Department of the Gulf, based in New Orleans, in December 1862. Banks was one of the political generals, having served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Republican governor of Massachusetts. Lincoln suggested that either Grant move south to help Banks in his attempts to take Port Hudson, Louisiana, or Banks move north to cooperate with Grant in attacking Vicksburg. Grant, however, knew that two hundred treacherous river miles lay between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and he did not trust Banks’s competency. Great respect for Lincoln notwithstanding, Grant rejected the idea. On April 2, 1863, Henry Halleck tele graphed Grant that the president was becoming “impatient” and continually asking “questions” about Grant’s progress.

  Lincoln put another roadblock in Grant’s path to Vicksburg when he allowed himself to be persuaded by another political general, John A. McClernand, who had served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln appreciated that McClernand, a Democrat, had led the way in damping down secessionist views in southern Illinois. The former congressman commanded a division at Forts Henry and Donelson and also at Shiloh, all under Grant.